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New Research Highlights Characteristics of Households Receiving Housing Assistance

NLIHC’s latest publication, Housing Spotlight: Who Lives in Federally Assisted Housing?, delves into new data from a public database on HUD-assisted households. The Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) database was released in February 2012 and provides household-level data on tenants participating in five of HUD’s largest programs: public housing, Project-Based Section 8, Section 202, Section 811 and Housing Choice Vouchers. The database is a 5% sample of households receiving federal assistance through these five programs (See Memo, 3/9).

The new Housing Spotlight stresses that federal programs serve households in great need of housing assistance. Most households living in subsidized units earn less than $20,000 a year, and many families include elderly persons, children and members with disabilities. Households that include at least one member with a disability comprise over a quarter of voucher recipients (28%). The elderly make up nearly half (46%) of all households living in Project-Based Section 8 units, and 35% of families living in public housing include children under 18.

The new data sample also includes the poverty rates of census tracts where tenants receiving housing assistance reside. Public housing tenants are more likely than households served by other federal housing programs to live in neighborhoods with a high poverty rate (40% or higher). Additionally, black and Hispanic households living in public housing are four times more likely than white public housing households to live in high poverty census tracts.

In general, however, voucher holders are more likely to live in lower poverty census tracts (those with poverty rates of less than 20%). By race, 68% of white voucher holders and 45% of black voucher holders live in low poverty neighborhoods, while just 4% of white households and 12% of black households holding vouchers live in high poverty neighborhoods.

NLIHC notes that there are policies that can provide public housing residents with more choices in their housing, such as the Rental Assistance Demonstration and the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative. In addition, NLIHC supports efforts to tie rental assistance to neighborhood-level rents, by ZIP code, in order to provide voucher holders with a broader array of neighborhood choices. Lastly, NLIHC notes that housing policy reform must also address the overall shortage of affordable housing for the country’s most vulnerable populations through investment in the National Housing Trust Fund, a vehicle for expanding the supply of housing for the lowest income Americans.